First thing that came to my mind when I opened this: hey let's test if maximization is just as broken as in real MacOS. And oh my god it is indeed! Safari won't maximize to the entire screen, just like in the real thing, and other apps like the terminal maximize correctly. Wow, this level of attention to detail is really crazy! :-)
macOS’s zoom functionality isn’t broken, it’s just content-size based rather than screen-size based: I like this, but some applications to implement the necessary hints and so it falls back to zooming to full screen.
macOS’s resizing has some useful functionality here: dragging an edge resizes in that direction, double-clicking an edge maximizes in that direction (including diagonally) and option+any of these resizes the opposite side of the window as well. So, if you hold option and double-click a corner, it’ll do a Windows-style maximize.
It depends what you mean by discoverable: option+mouse action is a pretty standard macOS convention for alternate behavior and “double-click == drag all the way” isn’t unreasonable. The behavior of option+double-click is discoverable by simple composition of these features.
Also, most of this sort of functionality is documented in the built-in help system accessible through the help menu.
I used macOS for about seven years before someone told me about this behavior. Never would've found it, otherwise.
I guess if I had been using it for twenty years I would've known about those old patterns you describe and would've thought to randomly try that key combination.
A tooltip at some point would've gone a long way. Pretty much an impossible feature to discover unless you're a toddler randomly pressing buttons or a greybeard that remembers OS 9
Apple Finder engineer here from 2000 - 2006 and would never have guessed about double-clicking or option-clicking window edges. This seems more like something I would have added to the Nautilus code in 1999.
> macOS’s zoom functionality isn’t broken, it’s just content-size based rather than screen-size based
So it is indeed broken. The fact that it's not humanly possible to fullscreen Safari without Spectacle/Rectangle clearly means it's broken, whether it's what th ey wanted or not.
I generally prefer the content-based zoom functionality. This is a case of people not used to the Mac conventions disliking that Macs don't work like Windows.
And, as I've pointed out, both behaviors are possible on macOS out of the box.
>
I generally prefer the content-based zoom functionality
Why? This makes absolutely no sense. It's the same thing as macOS' windows not closing when you close them. It's stupid. They should copy Windows on what makes sense.
Because I use a 55" TV a lot, and it's useful to make Preview or whatever just big enough that I can see an entire page without being too big to fit in the "comfortable reading" part of the screen. (I also like the App/Window/Document model of macOS)
I don’t understand the fascination with maximising windows, especially web browsers. What the hell is the point of filling my screen with the window when, for the vast majority of websites, half or more of it is gonna be empty margin?
Not doing that results in closing everything you can see easily in the GUI but it’s still burning RAM and being obnoxious where you can’t easily see it. If I wanted that to happen, I’d tell it to do that.
I don't want to have any non-maximized windows on my screen. I despise overlapping windows, and I want every single application I run to be full-screen, just like on a phone.
If that’s your preference, just do it. My comment wasn’t not about you or me, it was about what you get if you choose macos, how it works, and the reasoning behind that. This “I want how I want” sounds like a christian complaint in a mosque.
With macOS’s setup, I can command-tab to any open app (e.g. preview), hit the up arrow and then use the arrow keys to quickly open a recent document. Without the app model macOS uses, this is a lot less convenient, and I miss it every time I use my KDE Plasma Desktop.
The Mac has behaved like that since the classic days. This is the platform that invented overlapping windows. They aren't supposed to be maximized, as it's almost always a waste of screen real estate.
They don't? Some applications don't seem implement the content-size hints (or "content size" doesn't really make sense: e.g. iTerm) and macOS falls back to using the full screen size: but, Finder, Safari, Preview, Pages and even MS Word all do zoom the way I described.
On the surface, it may seem as if we’ve reached a common interface for mainstream desktop OSs, that one could use Windows and macOS interchangeably.
But there are still fundamental concepts that are unique to the Mac that always trip Windows users, namely, apps that keep running after all windows are closed and maximize vs full screen.
There’s obviously a common ground that has evolved over the years, but you must understand the platform in order to appreciate its subtleties or you’re bound to be frustrated.
Eh, I’ve been using MacOS as my daily driver for at least a decade. Before that was a variety of window managers on Ubuntu and Slackware. 20 years ago, and randomly when I can’t avoid it I’ve used windows.
But I’m far from a fan.
A lot of just plain silly defaults and UX weirdness gets attributed to some massive usability genius, but near a I can tell (from using all the platforms), it’s just designers making what could be straightforward functionality overly hidden or obtuse because of UX purity and insider cachet with power users or whatever - ending up with changes/behavior for everyone that is surprising and ends up getting in the way for people.
I have actual work to do, I don’t want to have to learn yet another secret handshake gesture in this version of MacOS or turn off new settings to stop it from screen locking me if I accidentally bump my mouse over.
Example - this thread and others like it, or the massive numbers of bug reports and forum complaints on the hot corner screen lock functionality when it came
out. and now windows is copying it, yuck.
